What a neat idea! Travesti is a new play that takes verbatim women’s “stories about unruly body hair, being groped on public transport, and experiences of sexual violence” and puts them in the mouths of an all-male cast. Here’s what its creators have to say about it:

By putting these stories in men’s mouths, we wanted to highlight the absurdities of typically ‘female’ behaviours – why are women expected to wear make up and men aren’t? Why are we expected to shave our body hair and men aren’t? Why are we expected to consider our safety at night in ways that men don’t have to? Happily, as a result, it also opens up interesting discussion about the social roles enforced on men, for example how male rape is something that is not discussed in the same way as female rape. Our intention was to make a feminist theatre piece that looks like the women we know: intelligent, playful, funny and sexy.

Want to help Travesti get to the Edinburgh Festival? Here’s their Kickstarter page.

BEDDING OUT emerges from the current welfare benefits overhaul, which threatens many with poverty and a propagandist campaign that has seen disability hate crime leap by 50%.

“I wear a public self that is energetic, dynamic and happening,” explains artist-activist Liz Crow. “I am also ill and spend much of life in bed. The private self is neither beautiful nor grownup, it does not win friends or accolades and I conceal it carefully.

“But for me, along with thousands more, this new system of benefits demands a reversal: my public self implies I don’t need support and must be denied, whilst my private self must be paraded as justification for the state’s support. For months, I have lain low for fear of being penalised, but the performer is beginning to re-emerge. Instead of letting fear determine who I am, I’d rather stare it in the face.” BEDDING OUT is a performance in which I take my private self and make it public, something I have not done in over 30 years. On this stage, for a period of 48 hours, I am performing the other side of my fractured self, my bed-life. Since the public me is so carefully constructed, this will be a kind of un-performing of my self.

“I want to show that what many people see as contradiction – what they call ‘fraud’ – is only the complexity of real life. This is not a work of tragedy, but of in/visibility and complication; a chance to perform my self without façade.”

The article even does what its interviewees suggest: most of the article is just quotes from Native designers, artists, and bloggers.

“The conversation is important, because acts of cultural appropriation are not simply isolated incidents of “hipsters in Navajo panties and pop stars in headdresses,” said Sasha Houston Brown, a member of the Santee Sioux Nation of Nebraska. They are byproducts of “systemic racism” that perpetuate the idea that there’s no such thing as contemporary Native culture. “Despite what dominant society and mainstream media say, Native culture is a vibrant and living culture. We are not a relic of the past, a theme or a trend, we are not a style or costume, we are not mascots, noble savages or romantic fictional entities.”

“What an ally does is support and help communicate the message of Native artists and entrepreneurs instead of speaking for them,” Brown said.

It would have been even better if the article had also discussed the connection between the amount of sexual violence American Indian women face (statistically) and the sexualization of them via things like the Victoria Secret runway show, ‘sexy Indian’ costumes, and other things. Brown discusses that in her article here at Racialiscious.

To promote its special exhibit on Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario has been handing out stick-on unibrows and photographing patrons wearing them. Here is a nicely trenchant response from the awesome feminist youth mag, Shameless. (It really is awesome, by the way. Consider buying subscriptions for the youths in your life!)

Here’s a taste:

I hate to be a joykill, here, AGO, but since when did celebrating an artist who challenged our ideas of feminine beauty by refusing to change the way she looked involve breaking her down through the implicit public ridicule of her appearance? Over the course of her lifetime and afterwards, Frida Kahlo’s unibrow was viewed as many things–striking, daring, odd, challenging, coy, studied, bold, memorable, and the reason why so many men fell love with her–but never as a city-wide joke. Why start now?

According to some interesting new research, the portrayal of strong female characters may be more important than plot content (including sex, violence, and even sexual violence) when it comes to shaping viewer attitudes to women.

Past research has been inconsistent regarding the effects of sexually violent media on viewer’s hostile attitudes toward women. Much of the previous literature has conflated possible variables such as sexually violent content with depictions of women as subservient

The submissive characters often reflect a negative gender bias that women and men find distasteful. This outweighed the sexual violence itself, giving credence to what Ferguson calls the “Buffy Effect”—named after the popular television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its strong lead female character.

“Although sexual and violent content tends to get a lot of attention, I was surprised by how little impact such content had on attitudes toward women. Instead it seems to be portrayals of women themselves, positive or negative that have the most impact, irrespective of objectionable content. In focusing so much on violence and sex, we may have been focusing on the wrong things,” Ferguson said.

“While it is commonly assumed that viewing sexually violent TV involving women causes men to think negatively of women, the results of this carefully designed study demonstrate that they do so only when women are portrayed as weak or submissive,” added Journal of Communication editor and University of Washington Professor Malcolm Parks. “Positive depictions of women challenge negative stereotypes even when the content includes sexuality and violence. In this way Ferguson reminds us that viewers often process popular media portrayals in more subtle ways than critics of all political stripes give them credit for.

Proving once again what we all (or at least all of us of a certain age) already knew: Buffy is so much more awesome than Twilight ever could be.

[Author’s note: It’s possible that the entire point of this post was just an excuse to put up Jo Chen’s Buffy Illustration. I’m okay with that.]

Snow White,the most passive “heroine” in history. This version of Snow White is special not because of what she does, but because of who she is. She is full of natural goodness–healing those around her with her very presence, bringing about magic with that beautiful green-eyed gaze and pouty lip-bite. Yes, near the end she finally grabs a sword and some armor, but it’s too little, too late.

The post is also pretty impressive in the “faint praise” department: “All that being said, there were a few good points. Hmmmm. Let’s see. Kristen Stewart has perfect eyebrows.”

In fact the commission that plans things has come up with an intriguing idea: a kind of giant commonwealth diary of those 60 years. You can pick any day and write about what interesting or significant things happened on that day. The only restriction is that it is about some commonwealth things.

Alternatively, you can write angry letters to the BBC for their list of the New Elizabethans, those UK people who have significantly affected the history in those 60 years. Does (approximately) 20% women seem right to you? No women authors, despite Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize. As I remember, no women visual artists, even though Tracy Emin and Fiona Rae, our contemporaries, are the only women to be professors at the Royal Academy since its founding 350+ years ago.

Perhaps people compiling the list did not keep sufficiently in mind that making very significant changes in the futures possible for women is indeed changing history. Or perhaps this is unfair. You can hear the head of the panel that selected the new Elizabethans, Lord Hall, discuss the process.

We noted some months ago that their performances seemed a remarkable combination of women’s traditional crafts and a very modern setting. We might – although reluctantly – see the NY Times as getting at a similar thought:

Eurovision is known for its over-the-top kitsch, but, even by its standards, there was something remarkable about grannies from the central Russian republic of Udmurtia, not far from where the Ural Mountains border on Siberia.

The Babushki, with an average age of 75, finished second over all with a jaunty pop song called “Party for Everybody.”

Wearing head scarves and traditional dresses and coin jewelry, they bounced up and down, waving their arms, smiling mischievously. They performed with a steaming oven as a prop on stage, and, at one point during their stay in Baku, they baked trays of perepechi, a traditional dish of meat and vegetable tartlets that they served to the Eurovision press corps.